I just ran across the video of a thoughtful and funny presentation on “How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict,” by one of my favorite authors, Robert Wright, at TED 2006. Wright begins by saying:
I’ve got, apparently, 18 minutes to convince you that history has a direction, an arrow; that in some fundamental sense it’s good, that the arrow points to something positive ….
He opines that the world is going to have to undergo a major upgrade in morality, because of what he identifies as:
- the growing lethality of hatred, in that technology allows people who hate the West, and who resent their own place in the world, to inflict organized violence on American soil and elsewhere; and
- the death spiral of negativity, in which retaliation begets retaliation, creating a destructive amplifying-feedback cycle. [DCT comment: Turn-the-other-cheek sounds pretty sensible in this context.]
Wright finishes by offering what he calls his reason for hope, for a cheerful outlook:
If we succeed, then once again, non-zero-sumness and a recognition of non-zero-sum dynamics [that is, recognizing that our individual welfares depend greatly on collaboration and promoting each other’s welfare] will have forced us to a higher moral level, a kind of saving higher moral level ….
The original meaning of the word ‘salvation’ in the Bible is about saving the social system. Yahweh is our savior means he has saved the nation of Israel, which at the time was a pretty high-level social organization.
Now social organization has reached the global level, and I guess if there’s good news I can say I’m bringing you, it’s that all the salvation of the world requires is the intelligent pursuit of self-interest, in a disciplined and careful way …. We’ve come too far to screw it up now.
(Emphasis added.) It’s well worth watching it all.